‘PHILISTINE’: British PM Starmer Removes Shakespeare Portrait From Downing Street Wall, Gets Heavily Criticized as a Typical Leftist Who Hates His Country’s Cultural Legacy
Already unpopular after little more than 100 days as British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer keeps showing his real face as a deranges leftist with all the bad things that it entails.
Plagues by endless scandals, Starmer has been caught accepting endless freebies from lobbyists, has had to fire his chief of staff with a super salary, while he plans to hike taxes and cut winter fuel benefit from pensioners.
Now, Starmer is waging war against Britain’s past.
It has now arisen that the Labour premier removed a portrait of William Shakespeare from the walls of No 10 (PM’s residence) – which is the latest painting of a great United Kingdom’s national figure to be ‘canceled’ under his rule.
The 18th-century portrait of ‘the Bard’, one of the world’s greatest writers, has been taken down and hidden in storage – a move that has led to protests and calls about his about ‘philistinism’.
Philistinism maybe be described as ‘the attitudes, habits, and characteristics of a person who deprecates art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect’.
Before Shakespeare was targeted, portraits depicting Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Ewart Gladstone and Margaret Thatcher have been removed since the ‘train-wreck Labour Government’ took office, sparking a big Conservative backlash.
The Telegraph reported:
“Sir Oliver Dowden, a former Tory culture secretary, said: ‘The Prime Minister spent the election loudly proclaiming his patriotism, but now the election is over he’s succumbing to the usual Left-wing cringing embarrassment about our past’.
‘Not content with removing Thatcher, Gladstone, Raleigh and Elizabeth I, he’s now consigning Shakespeare to the dustbin. Downing Street receives thousands of distinguished visitors every year. He should be using it to proclaim the greatest writer in the English language, not engaging in this philistinism’.
Robert Jenrick, the Tory leadership candidate, said: ‘We should celebrate and extol great figures in English history and stop being embarrassed by our identity. No other country would behave like this’.”
The Shakespeare painting that Starmer objected to was painted by Louis Francois Roubiliac. It is part of the Government Art Collection, ‘typically used to project British soft power’.
Once a prime minister is elected, they are entitled to use the collection to ‘decorate’ Downing Street.
The Prime Minister’s office framed the controversy as a matter of ‘interior design’, rather than the cultural scandal that it is.
But why was Shakespeare targeted?
“Many of Shakespeare’s plays were written during the reign of Elizabeth I, who patronized the early slave trade through pirates such Sir John Hawkins. Her portrait also no longer hangs in Downing Street.”
William Ewart Gladstone, the four-time Liberal prime minister, was cancelled because his father – not him – owned slaves.
In the Labour deranged frame of mind, other ministers also are trying to rewrite UK’s history by selectively sending historical figures to the rubbish bin.
Before she raises taxes, and cuts fuel benefits for the elderly, Finance Minister Raquel Reeves is also ‘redecorating’ her office.
“In September, Rachel Reeves demanded that pictures of men by male artists were removed from the state room at No 11. The Chancellor reportedly imposed a new female-only rule that all artworks on display in the room must be ‘of a woman or by a woman’.”
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